Group Multimedia Project - Project 3
Traditional writing still dominates the university, but times are changing! As you go through your undergraduate years and beyond, you will sometimes be required to combine your writing with other media—images, video, sounds, hypertext, fonts, colors, layout and style choices—to create multimedia texts. For this assignment, you will take a break from traditional writing-only texts and working by yourself, and collaborate with a group to create a page on a wiki for the Group Multimedia Project. The Basics The very first step will be to create accounts for yourselves. Only registered users will be allowed to create and edit pages on this wiki. Your group of five or six students each will choose any topic with which you are familiar and explore it in detail, by defining and describing all of its important characteristics. Like the last project, you will conduct research on the topic and list your sources on the bottom of your wiki page. All of your writing will be oriented toward this wiki. Each student in the group will be responsible for writing about one aspect of the topic. On the wiki, all group members will give comments to one another, and make revisions for one another. Each group member is expected to write the equivalent of at least three to four double-spaced and properly formatted pages for the written part. Even though this is a departure from traditional writing, you should use some of the same strategies you’ve used in your papers: ask complex questions, use relevant sources, and reflect multiple points of view wherever possible. In addition to this, you must include non-written components, definitely images but possibly videos and/or audio as well. Use your imagination! When each draft is finished, you will provide two copies of your work: 1) a part of the larger group article on this wiki and 2) a Word document posted to Assignments 2 in Niihka. You are required to do both; if you do only one, it won't be counted. The Project and Its Relationship to Other Wikis During this project, we will closely examine the most famous example of a wiki, Wikipedia, and discuss some of the features of wikis. There are many other specialized wikis on the Web that might interest you. However, as you write, you must make sure to use your own original language—do not copy language from Wikipedia in English or in any other language, or from any other source. If your topic is already on Wikipedia, you will need to make sure that your writing is substantially different from that article. In other words, focus on a different audience and their needs. Forming and Working in Groups You will form your own group, but you are strongly encouraged to find new partners—don’t just pick your friends. Since this is a group project, you will have to make sure that you share the workload equally, even though you will all have different responsibilities overall. Toward the end of the project, I will ask everyone to make a brief report on the contributions of group members to the project. This will partially determine your individual grade.[http://www.nytimes.com The New York Times] Topics of Vital Interest *How to Add Content to a Wiki Article *What do wikis look like? *How to use talk pages *Understanding page history *How to Add References to a Wiki Page External Links *English language Wikipedia *Niihka *Wikia directory of specialized wikis References